7 Ways to Fix Your Haunted House

Every house has secrets. Doors open or shut themselves. Lights flicker randomly. A toilet flushes on its own. And there's that deathly odor. You've been catching whiffs of it for years now, but you still can't seem to locate the source.Sorry, but your house is creepy. Even if you don't believe in ghosts, the noises you hear in the dead of night still give you the heebie-jeebies. At the very least, you feel conflicted: You love your place, of course—but it really bothers you that it does stuff that you just can't explain.Here at Popular Mechanics, we call it SHS (spooky-house syndrome). Rich Robbins, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pa., is something of an expert on the subject. Each October his lecture "Ghosts and Hauntings: Decide for Yourself?" draws a standing-room-only crowd. "We carry a prototype in our mind of what a house should be like," says Robbins, who holds a doctorate in social psychology. "When something out of the ordinary happens, we may or may not seek to explain it in rational terms."Robbins says he's "agnostic" about ghosts; he's never seen one but can't disprove them, either. At PM, we're a bit more matter-of-fact. When things go bump in the night, we reach for our toolbox and get to work.

7 Ways to Fix Your Haunted House

7 Ways to Fix Your Haunted House

Every house has secrets. Doors open or shut themselves. Lights flicker randomly. A toilet flushes on its own. And there's that deathly odor. You've been catching whiffs of it for years now, but you still can't seem to locate the source.

Sorry, but your house is creepy. Even if you don't believe in ghosts, the noises you hear in the dead of night still give you the heebie-jeebies. At the very least, you feel conflicted: You love your place, of course—but it really bothers you that it does stuff that you just can't explain.

Here at Popular Mechanics, we call it SHS (spooky-house syndrome). Rich Robbins, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pa., is something of an expert on the subject. Each October his lecture "Ghosts and Hauntings: Decide for Yourself?" draws a standing-room-only crowd. "We carry a prototype in our mind of what a house should be like," says Robbins, who holds a doctorate in social psychology. "When something out of the ordinary happens, we may or may not seek to explain it in rational terms."

Robbins says he's "agnostic" about ghosts; he's never seen one but can't disprove them, either. At PM, we're a bit more matter-of-fact. When things go bump in the night, we reach for our toolbox and get to work.

A Ghastly Stink from the Sink

A Ghastly Stink from the Sink

You keep a tidy bathroom, so why does it smell as if a possum is buried beneath the vanity?

Possibility: An awful thing took place in there—think shower scene from Psycho—and an olfactory trace of the event remains.

More Likely: The sink trap is dry. Normally it's filled with water, a simple and effective barrier to odors from the building's plumbing or the sewer system. But if the drain system has been badly designed or poorly installed, or the vent stack on the roof is plugged with leaves and sticks, the result is the same: Draining water creates a vacuum and sucks the trap dry. Another stink source may be the sink's overflow hole. The interior cavity leading from the overflow to the drain can become black with nasty-smelling slime.

The Fix: Getting the drain to work properly may involve replumbing it and the vent system, but the remedy could also be as simple as clearing the vent stack with a length of wire or a plumber's snake. To make slime disappear from the overflow channel, flush it out with a cleaner that contains bleach or a mildew killer.